pynchon-l-digest V2 #1795

[Doug Millison]

"Jane":
>I will never trust the people that keep talking about Nazis
>and Totalitarianism as if they are George Orwell and we are
>not living in the free world.


Then why read Pynchon? If anything is clear in his books, it's 
precisely that we are not living in a "free world" -- we're captives 
of a system that's driven by profits, technology, the need to control 
through media and deeper levels of cultural conditioning, a system 
that seeks to deny death, that shits its own bed with environmental 
destruction, that kills itself with War; a system in which we are 
complicit to a certain degree but our power pales in comparsion to 
that of the corporate interests that seek to manipulate technology, 
governments, public opinion.  That's the world Pynchon gives us in 
his novels, one in which our choices lie only in a narrow range of 
kindnesses to each other, love, family, community -- see Vineland and 
M&D for his mature expressions of the narrow possibilities for 
happiness in this life.

We can talk about Nazis in this forum only because Pynchon puts them 
in his novels in the first place -- they and their crimes play a role 
in each of his novels, through direct textual reference and clear 
allusion -- because they are a central part of the System that 
Pynchon describes in his novels, part of the fabric of life in our 
times.  Pynchon takes great pains to link the Nazis to mainstream 
Western governments and the corporate interests that rule our world, 
in the Cold War period and Regan/Bush in which he writes and we live. 
So save your breath, Pynchon brings the Nazis into this conversation 
in the first place, not his readers.

Orwell's influence on Pynchon is worth talking about, too.  I wrote 
some posts last year in that vein; the critical literature takes this 
up as well.

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